"Each generation, coming out of obscurity, must define its mission and fulfill or betray it." Frantz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. {r}evolution

Our mission is to nurture the transformational leadership capacities of individuals and organizations committed to creating productive, sustainable, ecologically responsible, and just communities. Through local, national and international networks of activists, artists and intellectuals we foster new ways of living, being and thinking to face the challenges of the 21st century.

HEALING CIVILIZATION By Grace Lee Boggs

The author of this important book is Dr. Claudio Naranjo, a psychotherapist who was born in Chile in 1932, grew up in a musical family and became a medical doctor in 1959.

While he was a medical student, Naranjo gave up music but remained interested in Art and the life of the spirit. Important influences from this period, he reports in his autobiography, were the Chilean visionary poet and sculptor Tótila Albert, poet David Rosenman Taub, and the Polish philosopher Bogumil Jasinowski.

In the 60s and 70s Naranjo came to the United States. On the east coast at Harvard, he encountered the psychogenic views of Jungian Henry Murray. On the west coast, at the University of California, he discovered the human potential movement at Esalen.

As a result, he decided that our whole civilization is sick and that the root cause of this sickness is the cultivation by our society of the patriarchal (technological, aggressive and warrior) brain at the expense of the feminine brain (nurturance) and the childhood brain (spontaneity).

To heal our civilization, he concluded, we as individuals need to transform ourselves by reunifying our three brains. At the same time we need to struggle against the domination of our educational institutions by patriarchal values, replacing these with the more feminine values which prevailed prior to the rise of patriarchal civilization in the late Neolithic. This was a matristic age during which women played key roles and the dominant values were the feminine ones of compassion, community and nurturance.

Naranjo’s book is a fascinating example of the diverse roads by which serious thinkers in different fields are arriving at the conclusion that we have come to the end of the period of pursuing rapid economic growth, which over the last few hundred years has done such great damage not only to our planet but to all living things, including ourselves.

“Getting and spending,” as Wordsworth, the early 19th century poet, put it, “ we have laid waste our powers.”

We have lived by the conviction that product is more important than process, that well-paid jobs are adequate compensation for our fragmentation and dehumanization on the assembly line.

Now we are in the midst of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called a “radical evolution of values” and Karl Polanyi called The Great Transformation.

“We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented to a person-oriented society,” warned King in his 1967 Beyond Vietnam speech.

“ The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research,” wrote Polanyi, “ is that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only so far as they serve this end. Neither the process of production or that of distribution is linked to specific economic interests attached to the possession of goods; but every single step in that process is geared to a number of social interests…. These interests will be very different in a small hunting and fishing community from those in a vast despotic society, but in either case the economic system will be run on non-economic motives.”

ON Being Krista Tippet

ON Being Krista Tippet
January 19, 2012
We travel to Detroit to meet the civil rights legend Grace Lee Boggs. We find the 96-year-old philosopher surrounded by creative, joyful people and projects that defy more familiar images of decline. It's a kind of parallel urban universe with much to teach all of us about meeting the changes of our time.
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Boggs Center 3061 Field St. Detroit, MI 48214

James and Grace Lee boggs Center To Nurture community Leadership
hpp//www.boggscenter.org / {r}evolution - the two side non-violent revolution in values.
The Boggs Center was founded in 1995 by friends and associates of James Boggs (1919 -1993) and Grace Lee Boggs (1915 - ) to honor and continue their legacy as movement activists and theoreticians.
Our aim is to help grassroots activists develop themselves into visionary leaders and critical thinkers who can devise proactive strategies for rebuilding and respiriting our cities and rural communities from the ground up, demonstrate the power of ideas in changing ourselves, our reality, and demystify leadership.